Cheré Suzette Bergeron, AHN-BC*, RN, PHN
Writer, Folk Historian, Memory Worker
Awe Archivist, Land Tender, Bukkehorn-Carrier
Weaver, Shapeshifter, Eldest Daughter of the Mississippi River
Clinical Herbalist, Craniosacral Bodyworker, Astrologer
*Advanced Holistic Nurse, Board Certified
I am live on Occupied Dakhóta Land, also known as East Saint Paul, Minnesota.
As an herbalist, I feel honored to carry the medicine-making tradition in my ancestral lineage. This includes my mother’s father’s father’s people — specifically my Great Great Great Great Grandparents Sigrid Torstendatter + Isak Vilhelm Erickson Brommer who lived in Valdres, Norway in the mid 1800’s. Together, they traveled the Norwegian countryside selling their medicines made from roots, barks, + berries.
I’ve been making medicine, maintaining a community apothecary, and offering herbal consultations since 2012 – with a focus on trauma-informed and queer + trans-centered herbalism.
In its first decade, Sassafras Healing Arts grew into an integrative, ancestral, bioregional, and community-rooted practice of holistic nursing, clinical herbalism, land-tending, stav-carrying, somatic bodywork, writing, researching, teaching, folk history, death midwifery, memory work, grief work, and mentorship. I situate myself as a lifelong student of these deeply interconnected crafts, practices, traditions, + lineages. I strive to center queerness, gender liberation, racial justice, and crip theory in my offerings.
My practice is driven by my desire to live and embody my values of authenticity, animism, decoloniality, disability justice, healing justice, interdependence, + non-linearity. I question the ways in which authoritarianism, absolutism, and fascism are perpetuated in movement work and ancestral healing practices. I aim to provide care and support in ways that undermine the wellness industrial complex. I believe deeply in the power of witnessing, co-regulation, embodiment, and relational healing as essential elements of collective liberation.
I love working with people to recognize their own intrinsic belonging, intuition, and interdependence. I support folks to cultivate a sense of curiosity in their lives – especially as it relates to their healing. I specialize in shame – acknowledging it as well as transforming it through acceptance of self as inseparable from the wild + holy world. This body of work is a intended to be woven into the well as a strand in the web of wyrd in service of dispelling and dismantling myths and structures of white supremacy and capitalism. I aspire to be a race traitor.
I am white, queer, nonbinary, neurodivergent, disabled eldest daughter of the Mississippi River. I live with C-PTSD, POTS, and a variety of other chronic illnesses. These experiences and aspects of who I am deeply inform my practice, worldview, and unique gifts.
tintype by Carla Alexandra Rodriguez of Blkk Hand
PAST WORK / BACKGROUND
My practice is currently based out of my Home Apothecary in Eastside Saint Paul, Minnesota. I practiced at the People’s Movement Center from 2017 until it sunset in 2020.
In 2019 I became a Registered Nurse + Public Health Nurse (RN, PHN) and in 2022 I received Board Certification as an Advanced Holistic Nurse (AHN-BC). I currently work as a Public Health Nurse as well as a birth justice community educator and organizer providing home visits to pregnant and postpartum people and families in order to reduce racial health disparities in Black and Indigenous communities.
In 2017 I completed my graduate level clinical herbalism program with a thesis on Herbal Supports for Queer + Trans Liberation.
I spent over a decade in my 20’s working as an advocate to survivors of intimate partner violence + sexual assault. In 2012 I began co-creating + co-founding SPIRAL Collective, while also deepening my studies of herbalism, bodywork/somatics, astrology, ancestral healing, and their intersections. Parallel to these paths, I also worked as a sexual health and pleasure educator. From 2012 -2017, I provided HRT injections & HIV testing at The Minnesota Transgender Health Coalition.
I carry Cajun (Gaulic), Scandinavian, Slavic, and Germanic heritage from my ancestors who lived in relationship with lands known to me today as France, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Czechia, Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, + Germany. From what I know through both research and oral tradition, my people have been working-class farmers, caretakers, healers, herbalists, midwives, nurses, blacksmiths, jewelers, clockmakers, merchants, and more.
I spent my childhood in New Orleans, Louisiana (Chickasaw, Chitimacha, + Choctaw Land) my adolescence in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin (Anishinaabe, Dakhóta + Ho-Chunk Land) + my early to mid 20’s in Duluth, Minnesota (Anishinaabe Territory).
